Paraesthesia: .NET Development and Some Pictures of My Cat

Charting Hanselminutes

Before I even get into this, let me preface it by saying
Scott’s a friend of mine and he’s a great
guy. I told him I was posting this before I did it. It’s just some
interesting data that I got in an interesting way and thought folks
would be interested. It’s also intended to totally crush Scott’s spirit.
(I kid! I kid!)

So.

I was just writing about how I was seeing more and more video
blogs and was
thinking about the earlier days of Hanselminutes when it seemed like the
show was shorter. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just my mind playing
tricks on me so I did some data gathering. This is actually about the
process I went through.

The idea: create a graph of the
Hanselminutes podcast duration over time
so a trendline can be established.

At first I thought it would be pretty straightfoward - I could grab the
RSS feed and just parse out the duration info. Turns out they don’t
actually list how long each show runs, so I had to change my tack and
analyze the MP3 durations directly.

Step 1: Getting the MP3s.

I’m not a Powershell guru but this sounded pretty Powershell-ish to me.
The thing is, I already had some tools that would do some of the job for
me, so I didn’t write the whole thing in Powershell. It went like this:

Grab the RSS feed for the show by just right-click and save-as from
the site.

Get the URLs for the MP3s. I used a command-line XPath query tool
for that, looking at /rss/channel/item/enclosure/@url. That gave
me a nice list of the URLs to the show.

Get the MP3s. This is where I did a little brute force Powershell
scripting. I suppose I could have saved the list of URLs to a text
file and then wrote a script that read in the lines from the text
file, but I didn’t. I did a regex search-and-replace to create a
script that looks like this: